


what's gonna kill you is the second part

by fivesecrets



Series: six degrees of separation [2]
Category: Men's Football RPF
Genre: Gratuitous Winter Imagery, Introspection, M/M, Pining, Post-Heartbreak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:55:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26622520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivesecrets/pseuds/fivesecrets
Summary: Like always, there’s nothing new, and he despises how much it breaks him.Just to get rid of it, he types out something that probably doesn’t make any sense and clicks send before he can stop himself.Or, in which everything reminds Julian of Kai.
Relationships: Julian Brandt/Kai Havertz
Series: six degrees of separation [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1936024
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	what's gonna kill you is the second part

**Author's Note:**

> • this is very short because it's literal pure introspection and i couldn't drag it out any longer  
> • thank you all for your well-wishes with university, i'm having a great time despite corona! but i am also so busy hence why this took forever and is so short  
> • edit 14/10/2020 - i just got moved into the higher german class but i'm now 9 days behind a class that moves at lightning speed so i have HELLA WORK to do so i've got no idea when i will get time for the next part, sorry  
> • hope you're all well! x

The wind whistles through the bare branches of the trees, providing a beautiful contradiction to the waterfall of anguish poring through Julian. It’s gentle, enclosing him under an invisible archway decorated with tiny droplets of snow. Briefly, he wonders if he shouldn’t be here, him and all his emotional baggage drawing unsightly markings in the soft white under his feet, tarnishing the simple perfection with his body made out of fiery anger, staining everything a sickening blood-red and leaving an unquestionable, yet fleeting, trace of his heartbreak behind him.

A trail for anyone who cares enough to follow, except Julian doesn’t want anyone to know about it.

He knows it’ll only be here until the snow melts, as quietly and effortlessly as it came, yet he’d give anything to exterminate it. Kai had always chastised him for being too closed-off with his emotions, too unwilling and hostile towards anyone who dared try and help, and he’s spent countless days wondering if there actually was truth in that statement, before he’s fallen victim to another bout of rage and wrath at the mere memory of his former best friend.

He wouldn’t know what he’d say if Kai tried to tell him the same thing now. Maybe he’d just stare the younger man down; convey his displeasure through a wordless stare that could turn him to stone, or maybe anything Kai might try to say by way of explanation would be lost in the wake of Julian’s vexation at his hypocrisy exploding out of him.

Dwelling doesn’t do him any favours, but he can’t stop himself. Kai plays out like a cinema reel of milliseconds, the moments all fused together and flashing before his metaphorical eyes, accompanied by a faint, hazy composition of Kai’s voice. Julian can’t quite decipher what Kai’s saying, but he thinks it might have been his name.

It’s accompanied, drowned out almost, by the gorgeous wash of his former best friend’s laugh.

Julian knows he is prone to flairs of melodrama, but even he isn’t stupid enough to start reminiscing in a way that implies he’ll never get to hear Kai’s laugh again. There will be international breaks, maybe even Champions League matches, where they’ll see each other, surrounded by a host of their friends and, late after games, copious amounts of alcohol. Besides, Jannis doesn’t know the half of what really went down between them the night Kai left for London, Julian knows he’s still in frequent contact with his former best friend, and he won’t be able to avoid every single meeting. Kai’s laugh never belonged to him, and therefore he isn’t entitled to demand in its absence.

The lack of real tragedy in his situation is almost tragic in itself.

Snow catches in his hair, painfully white against the blonde streaks falling over his face for the few moments before they melt, leaving his hair matted and dark. And that’s where the problem starts, because he doesn’t want to remember all these dumb little things about Kai, doesn’t want to be the kind of jilted bitter person who associates everything with their lost love, but he can’t stop himself. The cinema playing in his mind cuts to the time they played in Hamburg, how hot Kai’s body had felt beneath his own, how unashamedly he’d pushed his teammates away so he could be the one touching his best friend.

The scene snaps to somewhere he doesn’t care to remember, where the snow had piled up deeper than normal on the pavement as the team had trekked back to their hotel. Kai had been wrapped up against the cold (in spite of himself, a smile creeps onto his lips when he thinks of the younger’s endless whines against the evil of winter) but a curl of hair had been poking out of his beanie. Fresh droplets had caught in it, stark against the darker tone of Kai’s complexion, and it was one of those moments where Julian had struggled to believe he was actually _real._

Sometimes, he still doesn’t.

His feet are aching from all the walking, he’s probably got blisters or inflamed red welts that the team doctor is going to give him hell for tomorrow at training, so he wipes the snow off an ornate steel bench and collapses down onto it. He doesn’t know precisely where he is, but he never strayed from the straight path out from one of the lakes in the Westfalenpark, so he isn’t panicked. 

Part of him wants to stare at the sky, watch the overcast clouds heavy with snow drift across his eyeline, but he doesn’t want to resemble some cliché film or be blinded by chunks of frozen water, so he stays watching more snow land inaudibly on the makeshift footway. Time doesn’t really matter to him, so long as he doesn’t contract pneumonia.

He wonders what the others would say if they knew how often Kai was on his mind. Julian might be only twenty-four, but his walk of life is so chaotic, so much can happen in such a short time, it seems to him that everything he could’ve experienced has already happened to him, to _them_ , and that’s making it way harder to forget the way the sunlight glimmers in Kai’s eyes, or the way his _fucking stupid_ smile would curl across his face after he’d told one of his absolutely shitty jokes while whatever it was occurred.

It’s like living with a million ghosts, aside from the haunting fact that the culprit isn’t dead.

They shroud him at every turn, taunting him with the fact he can’t touch them to punch their fucking lights out, the fact they probably can’t hear him to appreciate the vicious expletives in his voice as he screams at them to fuck off. How they can come and go as they please, and Julian’s stuck in the limbo of Kai’s non-answer and the sound of the door half-slamming shut behind him. Except now, he thinks an answer is as far away as it ever was.

Whenever people would tell him that heartbreak isn’t linear, he never truly understood what they meant. He cried over his breakup with his first girlfriend back in high school, he remembers taking a couple of days to wallow in what he felt like was the worst pain ever (in reality, it was only so dejecting because he thought that was how he was _supposed_ to feel), but he forgot it all after a school holiday and weeks of doing nothing but play football. He couldn’t be blamed for thinking they’d conjured the whole thing up.

He supposes he owes them all an apology for writing off their words with such a blasé attitude.

The pattern of whatever it is he feels for Kai is completely untraceable, it doesn’t even resemble a mountain range with organised peaks of agony; not a pinstripe gradient; simply a endless line swooping up and dropping off in some false re-enactment of suicide, never diverting or forming anything resembling a course, but barring him in, like a rollercoaster it’s far too late to get off.

Right now, he’s on the painstakingly slow chain lift, with the peak visible but equally looking impossible to reach. Not knowing when he’s going to go hurtling down the other side is the thing that floods his veins with the icy thrum of apprehension; it could be here, sitting on this bench as the snowdrops flutter down next to him, or long after night has fallen tonight, or tomorrow when he’s taking a water break at training.

Dortmund is so serene, he thinks, when he’s able to drag his eyes away from the invisible steel frame of emotion; so surrounded in woodland, the air is crisp and clear and at least he’s able to fucking _think_ here. And that doesn’t help either, because it’s such an antithesis to what Kai might be looking out at right then, of the lights that never turn off completely, the noise and sirens and the people who walk purposefully and blend into the purple-grey that is London.

Kai and he had their differences, and he had always been grateful for it. It was the main reason why they bounced off each other so well, why they so rarely argued, but he never took the time to contemplate the depths of it.

Maybe if he had, he would have been more prepared for the look on Kai’s face when his phone had rung during the break, the excitement he was desperately trying to curb for everyone else’s sake, how Julian had already seen flashes of London glinting in Kai’s eyes even back then. Maybe he’d be more prepared for the type of lifestyle they’d both chosen, the rift too wide for friendship to quite paper over, no matter how close Julian thought they were.

He wants to see him so badly it aches. Or maybe worse than aches, maybe it’s gnawing painfully at his insides, rendering his vital organs useless until he shuts down entirely. He wonders if that would be preferable. At least the pain coursing through his veins then wouldn’t be flowing out from the unreachable centre of his heart.

With nothing more than a particularly sharp gust of wind, the snowflakes are suddenly being pelted in his face, and it’s like the barely audible whistle as they float past his ears mock him, whisper something he can’t retaliate against, something he can’t quite understand but he could recognise the derisive tone anywhere. It angers him, subjugated rage prickling back underneath the surface of his skin, it’s like Kai’s voice has carried itself in the weather, some pathetic fallacy bullshit he just knows his former best friend would be petty enough to use.

“Come on then, Kai,” he says without thinking, and then he’s left reeling because it’s so _fucking familiar,_ the lilt in his voice like a red rag to a bull to the younger man. They’d play fight, and Kai would always end up on top of him, skin tinted scarlet and breathing just a little too heavy for Julian to avoid shuddering at the prickle of goosebumps across his skin.

Once, Kai had even traced a finger down the side of Julian’s body, feather-light against the patch of skin that had fallen exposed as Julian’s shirt had ridden up, and Julian was convinced his heart was beating loud enough to be heard from the other side of the fucking world.

He hadn’t wanted to consider it, but even back then, he thought he’d seen something in Kai’s eyes.

Now he knows he must have been wrong, and the reality comes crashing back down with the viciousness of a tsunami formed of water that might as well have been miles below freezing. He must have just seen what he longed for, because he can’t fathom why Kai wouldn’t have confessed when he did if he felt the same.

He’s had time to digest it, had time to shield his heart against the onslaught Kai won’t call off. But he’s doing a terrible job of it, there are far too many chinks in the armour that the younger man can spot with a frustrating ease, that Kai doesn’t hesitate to drive his knife directly into.

Julian could count his scarless puncture wounds.

All of it burns him out, if snow were to land on his bare skin it would sizzle with such contrast.

Flakes catch on his eyelashes, melt, wet his eyes, and suddenly it’s impossible to distinguish if he’s crying. He might be, but he’s so hot regardless of the weather he couldn’t decipher it.

He wonders if the snow is falling in London, framing Kai in the perfect way that everything Kai does has. And that’s where his problem is, because his mind simply falls into a premediated, disastrous cycle of _wanting him_ and _not knowing what the fuck to do about it_ , multiplied by all the memories that are only becoming more solidified in his desperation to forget them.

With frozen fingers, he pulls his phone out of his pocket. He’s almost surprised he’s got any signal out here, probably miles from the city, but his fingers travel to Kai’s contact unconsciously. It hadn’t fallen far down the list, the amount of times he’d clicked to it just to reread what they used to have is more than he’d have the will to admit.

Like always, there’s nothing new, and he despises how much it breaks him.

Just to get rid of it, he types out something that probably doesn’t make any sense and clicks send before he can stop himself.

His phone’s back in his pocket before he realises the message hasn’t gone through.


End file.
